Taking “A fresh look at the many roles General Aviation Airport play in the National Air Transportation System,” the FAA recently released the 34-page report of its in-depth, 18-month study of roughly 3,000 airports, General Aviation Airports: A National Asset.

By activity level, the study groups GA airports into four categories: national, regional, local, and basic. Each more clearly defines an airport’s functions and economic contribution to its hometown, and the nation as a whole.

The FAA undertook the study because it’s been 40 years since it last reviewed them. Noting that a lot has changed during that time is an obvious understatement. But one thing that has not changed is that most people who live in communities served by a GA airport don’t have a clue what goes on there, let alone what contributions they make to the community.

At the same time, most people who do know what’s going on at the airport, and what contributions its makes, aren’t very good at either articulating or sharing what they know with others. This study should help airport boosters who suffer from both afflictions.

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Evelyn Bryan Johnson died May 10, 2012 in her 102nd year. She was a flight instructor. She stopped counting the number of people she’d taught to fly when the number passed 3,000. A designated pilot examiner since 1952, when I met her in 1997 at her induction to the NAFI Flight Instructor Hall of Fame, she’d given more than 9,000 checkrides.

Diminutive, whippet-thin, with all seeing eyes that didn’t miss much, Evelyn was one of the most unpretentious people I’d ever met, in aviation or out of it. She’d be, I think, as surprised at whose reporting her passing. Google News lists 398 outlets, from NPR and and all the major newspapers, to local Tennessee medial outlets and Sky News Australia. And I’m sure she’d shake her head at the focus of their reports, her total flight time, 57,625.4 hours, according to the The New York Times.

You see, the teacher many called Mama Bird, who finally retired in 2005 at age 95, didn’t really care about numbers. What mattered most was flying, and flying safely, whether she was teaching a newcomer the ways of aviation or examining their skills and knowledge at the end of training. Every flight, she told me later, was an educational opportunity, and that’s what kept aviation compelling.

Evelyn lived most of her life in and above Morristown, Tennessee. In my waning years at Flight Training one of my unfulfilled goals was sitting down with her and the patriarch of flight training, William K. Kershner, who lived, until his death in 2007, a couple of hours to the southwest, in Sewanee, Tennessee. Another unpretentious teacher for whom flying safely and making the most of every educational opportunity mattered most, we talked about getting together often. But our respective schedules never coincided for what I’m sure would have been an epic conversation.

What set these historic teachers of flight apart from the rest was a fundamental tenet of education that seems missing today. At its core, education, aviation or otherwise, really isn’t about curricula or technology. What matters most is the personal, human connection between teacher and student, united in a shared passion for learning. And that the best teachers are really still students who eagerly share what they’ve learned with others. –Scott Spangler

Flight accidents that are the result of negligent behavior may call for an aviation litigation expert like Kansas City Personal Injury Attorney Robb & Robb.

Last week, the middle school where I am a substitute teacher held its annual career and hobby day, where students sign up for presentations  that interest them. I was on duty as a student wrangler, not a speaker, and it was happenstance that I ended up with 35 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders interested in aviation.

The presenters were two young flight instructors from a nearby collegiate aviation program. When a non-flying person needs an expert, a CFI is the first choice because being a pilot is something most non-flyers understand, and who best to speak about them than those who teach them to fly.  Unfortunately, public speaking, like customer service and sales, is not part of the CFI practical test standards.

Consequently, the kids quickly grew bored with the unpracticed, myopic presentation that rarely strayed far from the presenters’ aviation goals. In fairness, I don’t know how much warning they had about this speaking gig, and they tried their best, but it was a missed opportunity because of a poor situational awareness of aviation careers beyond their airline and corporate aspirations.

My point is that opportunities to get non-flyers excited about professional and recreational aviation to non-flyers of all ages are rare. In most cases, flight instructors are the go-to last-minute speaker. So why not have a presentation, supported with a PowerPoint presentation, on a flash drive? And why  not practice it once, so you’re ready for last-minute calls.

Putting together such a presentation is no harder than a lesson plan. All it takes is a little bit of time, accepting that there’s more to aviation than the career carrot you happen to be pursuing, and an Internet connection. Before you start, you should know two things: Who is your audience, and what is the desired focus, professional or recreational flying?

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I was trying to explain some of the subtleties behind the word altruism to my daughter this morning at breakfast, and it made me think about the fight against aviation user fees.

And yes, we have a few truly interesting family meals around our house. Those dine-ins are, in fact, a large part of what my wife and I see as our responsibility as parents, to sit down at least a couple of times each week to find out what’s happening with our family in general, especially our daughter. We don’t know for sure they help, but we believe in the process enough to make the effort.

Altruistic deed-doers make the effort because they believe it’s the right move for their family or their community. And they don’t expect a reward at the other end for their labors either. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 24, the e-mail edition of Callback arrived in my in box. It proudly announced that the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System had processed its one millionth safety incident report on March 21, 2012. Three days later I received the NTSB release addressing 2011’s preliminary stats, No Fatalities On U.S. Airlines or Commuters, General Aviation Accidents Increased.

Safety is the only direct relationship between the coincidental announcements.

After reading the 2011 stats, there appeared to be no significant reason for alarms. The increases were small, just 50 more accidents for all of civil aviation, with total fatalities up just 12, and on-demand Part 135 ops and GA were responsible for the the bulk of them. Given the small numbers, they are the margin of error that nothing will eliminate.

Digging into the ASRS numbers, and who made the reports, proved far more interesting. NASA started counting them in April 1976, and reached 1 million a month short of 36 years later. Using simple math, that’s 27,778 a year, 2,315 a month, 579 a week, or 83 a day. This ASRS chart above shows how quickly pilots got on board with the program. But that’s not the surprise. It’s who made the reports, and the demographic changes in their numbers over three decades of pilot population shrinkage.

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I’ve been a movie geek since I was a kid. So how could I refuse Zac’s Colbert’s (relation to Stephen Colbert??) request to pontificate about which movies are his favorites during airline travel? I wonder if my friend Mary Kirby at the Airline Passenger Experience Association agrees?

Rob Mark, publisher

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As a movie lover who also enjoys traveling, in-flight entertainment is a regular and important feature of my life. As a result, I’ve been the consumer of some fantastic and atrocious choices of film when flying.

Best

Airplane!

This is one of the funniest and most critically successful spoof films of all time, holding a 98% rating on movie aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. The combination of deadpan acting, witty one liners and ludicrous sight gags is over 30 years old, but survived the test of time. It’s been imitated but never matched and is surely one of the best movies to help your flight go quickly … “But don’t call me Shirley.”

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At the World Aviation Training Symposium, held last week in Orlando, Boeing’s chief test & evaluation pilot for new airplane development, Mike Carriker, said the industry must modernize its educational methods and technology if it hopes to prepare pilots and technicians to “maximize the capabilities of today’s high technology airplanes.”

While aircraft and teaching technology have “evolved exponentially” over the past half century, aviation training has not progressed beyond the rote regurgitation of knowledge and skills that satisfy disassociated evaluation tasks. Few will disagree with his assessment that the industry must now employ modern methods and technology in competency-based training not only to make the global transportation efficient and economical, but  “to reestablish the aviation industry as an attractive career option.”

Given our entrenched political, economic, and social polarization, there is little or no chance that the industry will make this needed transition. It matters little that, according to Boeing’s annual Pilot & Technician Outlook, that we must educate a million new pilots and technicians in the next 20 years. In the zero-sum game that is modern life, ideological preeminence is more than the common good.

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As a Vietnam-Era veteran myself and someone who used the G.I. Bill to cover the cost of some of my early flight training, I was more than a little interested when June Olsen approached me about writing a story about today’s G.I. Bill (Actually, I’m always interested in aviation-focused guest post from good writers).

June recently graduated with a degree in educational psychology and works as a writer on all things education from her home in Bellevue Washington.  She’s always interested in connecting with bloggers online too. You’ll find her at june.olsen80@gmail.com. And now, on to June’s story about what vets need to know about the new G.I. Bill.

Rob Mark

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When veterans return home after their service, it is natural that they would want to begin the next chapter in their life by getting the education and training necessary to join the workforce. After all, having a solid career is a great way to support a family and find personal fulfillment.

Many therefore avail themselves of the G.I. Bill, which provides tuition assistance to returning veterans. Veterans rightly see the G.I. Bill as a way to receive the training they need to have a successful career. However, the GI Bill does not always cover all tuition in all situations, and as a result some veterans search for the least expensive college program available. While this may seem like a good idea, particularly in light of the skyrocketing cost of higher education, it pays to conduct diligent research comparing traditional and accredited colleges online.

Some veterans choose to enroll in a non-accredited program. While this might seem like a minor issue, it is in fact very important. Many employers and certification bodies don’t consider degrees obtained at non-accredited institutions valid. In practical terms, this means that, for example, if a veteran received a nursing degree from a non-accredited nursing program, many hospitals or statewide nursing certification boards would not recognize the degree. This could be a significant problem: after several years of training, the veteran would find him or herself with a degree that is essentially useless in advancing his or her career goals.

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For decades, individuals and organizations have focused attention and effort on rebuilding the pilot population. But for the first time in memory, AOPA is drawing attention to—and doing something about it with its Keep ‘em Flying Challenge—an equally important number: hours flown. And it asks pilots to push themselves beyond the hundred-buck burger run.

Like the pilot population, the hours flown by GA and Part 135 pilots has been in bumpy decline since 1980, when they logged more than 41 million hours. In 1990 it was 32 million; in 2000 it was 29.9 million; and in 2010 is was 24.8 million hours, up from 23.7 the year before.

AOPA elegantly shares the wealth and benefits of getting airborne and motivates participation with a random drawing that will award a $2,499 grand prize, $1,000 to second place, $500 to third place, and four $250 fourth-place awards.

There’s one entry per pilot, and qualification is on the honor system. Between April 1 and July 31, 2012, pilots must fly at least five hours as pilot in command of an aircraft to five destination airports more than 50 nautical miles away, and complete an Air Safety Institute online course.

That sounds like more fun than the prosaic burger mission to the same old airports. Aviation is about adventure, so add your own challenge. Fly to five never-before visited airports or seek all available runway options: grass, gravel, asphalt, and concrete, short and soft, wide and narrow.

And don’t forget to invite your friends. Making your challenge a social event with passengers (prospective or lapsed pilots you may know) and more than one airplane adds to the fun! Let me know what personal challenge you come up with, because flying is also about sharing. –Scott Spangler

The Terrafugia Transition’s appearance at the New York auto show made the news recently. Flying cars have been an interesting engineering exercise since the late 1940s, but they really aren’t practical. Just ask Popular Mechanics: 7 Reasons the Terrafugia Transition Isn’t Coming to Your Garage.

This is the point that hit home with me. The author compared the Terrafugia to the Cessna 152; would you spend $279,000 on a dual-purpose 152?  And that assumes the manufacturer successfully certifies it as a light-sport aircraft, and that they can hold this price. For half the price of a flying car you can buy a  Cessna 162 SkyCatcher, which leaves more than enough for a really nice car—and gas money for both.

Much more interesting is the PAL-V (Personal Air and Land Vehicle),which recently made its maiden flight in the Netherlands, captured in the video above. Engineers bred a two-seat, three-wheel motorcycle with a gyrocopter and designed a fascinating low-profile, fold-away rotor, prop, and tail. On the ground and in the air, this thing looks like fun.

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Back in the paper era I was filled with two-part dread every time the FAA’s Airman Testing Standards Branch had updated its practical test standards (PTS) and aviation training handbooks. Part I was the expense of keeping my training library up to date. Part II was discovering what had changed.

Digital publishing and Internet distribution has retired dread Part I. So the recent notice that it had revised three practical test standards and three handbooks:

PTS: Private Pilot Airplane (FAA-S-8081-14B, effective June 1, 2012); Commercial Pilot Airplane (FAA-S-8081-12C, effective June 1, 2012); and Parachute Rigger (FAA-S-8081-25B, effective July 1, 2012).

Handbooks: Aviation Maintenance Technician—Powerplant (2 volumes, FAA-H-8083-31); Aviation Maintenance Technician—Airframe (2 volumes,  FAA-H-8083-32); and Flight Navigator (FAA-H-8083-18) .

Really? There’s still a flight navigator certificate, in the GPS-guided 21st century? Curiosity demands that I check that out before I assess my Part II dread in the PTS and Handbooks.

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Phatic speech is what we say without thinking to start a conversation. “What’s up?” are the ones I hear most, and for the past 30-some years my answer has been the same: “Anything above eye level—it’s a relative term.” This usually stops people in their tracks because they didn’t expect an answer, especially one they have to think about.

“Flying fun” is another relative term, because fun is a personal pursuit. Below is a case in point. Unless you live in Alaska (or somewhere like it) earning a seaplane rating doesn’t make much sense for most pilots. I mean, really, without taking off your shoes you can probably count the number of places that rent floatplanes to rated pilots off the street.

But as a friend from my EAA days, Mariano Rosales (with Table Rock Aviation manager Brandon Nesmith in the back seat), clearly shows here, learning how in a Cub, with the door open, sure looks like fun to me, and I’d give anything to be in his place (if I fit in the front seat of a Cub, that is)!

In his blog at the Air Facts Journal, John Zimmerman acknowledges this relativity in Want to Fix Flight Training? Have Some Fun. His honesty is startling: “As flight schools we’re selling the wrong thing. Instead of offering a fun and unique experience that is rewarding at every step, many flight schools are simply trading $10,000 for a piece of plastic that says Private Pilot.”

And he explains, succinctly, why it’s the wrong thing. “For better or for worse, the student pilot of 2012 is very different from the 1970s man who walked into the local Cessna Pilot Center. In particular, customers today are after meaningful experiences, not necessarily checking the box. “The aviation lifestyle” may sound like a catchphrase, but it’s what most student pilots are seeking.”

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Should passengers ever be afraid on an airplane? Let me think on that a second. Ah … nope. I don’t think so.

I know it happens  sometimes when people fly on small airplanes piloted by some dumb-fool hot-rod aviator. We all pay the price for that goofiness through awful accident statistics. But on an airliner or a business airplane flown by professional pilot? There should never be a fear factor.

I pay attention to how an airplane’s flying when I’m in the cabin. Maybe I know TOO much as a biz jet pilot — the sounds, the feel and all that. But I also know when I’m uncomfortable flying. And in 40 years, it hasn’t happened often.

Returning from France last month on an Iberia A340 through Madrid was one of those few times though. And it was more about being frightened – yup, scared – as we approached ORD than the fact that my seat for the 9-hour ride home felt like it was made of wood (which it did) or that the service was lousy (which it was). Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend the New York Times published an enlightening piece—63 Years Flying, From Glamour to Days of Gray—about Ron Akana, United Airline Flight Attendant Seniority Number 1. You read that right, he’s been flying for 63 years. Hawaiian born, he was a 21-year-old in a aloha shirt when he was selected from among 400 applicants to fill eight steward positions, one for each of the Hawaiian islands. Above, he’s third from the right.

As expected, the article highlighted the differences in airline flight over his career. What was more interesting—and telling—were the demographics of the industry’s flight attendance corps. Based on his analysis of 2010 census data, University of Texas-San Antonio sociologist Rogelio Saenz revealed that 40 percent of roughly 110,000 FA’s are at least 50, if not older.

Here’s the important part: less than 18 percent of flight attendants are 34 or younger. Seniority equals employment tenure, and Mr. Akana’s service is the textbook example. But I wonder if the ability to work more years is the primary reason why their average age is increasing. In the late 1960s courts finally overturned the airline requirements that female flight attendants had to retire at 32 and quit if they got married or pregnant.

Back in the day, when people dressed up to fly, airlines served real food, and every seat offered first-class room, flying held promise of far flung adventures to romantic destinations. And those were the days when being an airline pilot was also a daydream destination of many youngsters as they looked for a career. Could the dearth of younger flight attendants be an indication related to cyclic shortages of qualified pilots to show that the industry must finally stop living in the past?

At all levels, from flight instructor to flight attendant to airline captain, the industry has relied on a bountiful supply of starry-eyed people who’ve “paid their dues” (saving the airlines millions) because they’d do anything to fly. People starting their careers today don’t possess, from what I’ve read and experienced, any real motivation to make similar sacrifices. For the foreseeable future, the airlines are going to need crews, so it will be interesting to see how the airlines will attract and train them. And as passengers, we must always remember that in every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. –Scott Spangler

It’s been too many years since I was last pilot in command of an airplane, and even longer since I’ve made a cross-country flight. The AOPA Air Safety Institute must have known that flying may well be part of my life in the near future because in an email it asked, “How sharp is your VFR cross-country knowledge?” and a link to its safety quiz.

It asks 10 questions about a 350 mile VFR trip from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to Festus, Missouri. As necessary, it provides blow-up sectional chart images on which to search for the correct multiple-guess response. Like most pilots I was pretty confident of my knowledge, even though I haven’t put it into practice for a few years. The result was humbling. If you want to know how badly I blew it, you’ll have to keep reading.  Needless to say, there’s a ground school refresher in my future.

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Did you know that March is Women’s History Month, and that Women of Aviation Worldwide Week started March 5?  I didn’t, until a friend shared  an e-mail from Penny Hamilton, a pilot with a Ph.D. who’s invested a lot of time studying just about every aspect of Teaching Women to Fly.

If you don’t remember her work, take another look at my post from January 2, 2011,  Women & Aviation: Still No Real Change. Things, as most will agree, have not gotten any better since then. (And beyond aviation, of late they have taken another turn for the worse.)

But she and others haven’t quit. In Denver on March 1 Dr. Penny and her research partner, Dr. Marie-Line Germain of Western Carolina University, presented their full research and theory paper at the 2012 Academy of Human Resource Development International Research Conference in the Americas.

Their paper, “Women Employed in Male-Dominated Industries: Lessons Learned from Female Aircraft Pilots, Pilots-in-training and Mixed-gender Flight Instructors,” focuses on problems of exclusion, male-dominated industries, and rethinking human resources development.

During this week, Women of Aviation offers a plethora of activities and contests designed to get females of all ages involved. More important to me is that it welcomes the participation of anyone who believes that aviation would be better off with more women involved, and each one of us can make a difference.

I’ll take that one step further. For the most part, we men haven’t done a very good job of nurturing the pilot population (or the nation). Maybe now is the time to step aside and give women a chance. They certainly can’t do any worse than we have. –Scott Spangler

In an attempt to keep current with all aspects of aviation, I subscribe to all manner of e-mail updates. In this arena, the FAA is prolifically focused. My latest discovery is the InFO, short for Information For Operators.

Produced by the FAA’s Flight Standards Service, these notices contain “valuable information for operators that should help them meet certain administrative, regulatory, or operational requirements with relatively low urgency or impact on safety.”

Initially, the idea of focusing on one difference between US and Canadian ATC phraseology might spark a giggle. After all, isn’t English the official language of aviation? How different or confusing could the phraseology used to issue a standard terminal arrival be?

George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright and journalist, indirectly answered this question when he wrote that the English and Americans are “two peoples separated by a common language.” Having reported several stories about Canadian aviation, I’ll second this with a hearty Roger THAT!

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Word of Mouth marketing (WOM) is a bit like the Superman of campaigns. Nothing can stop it. That’s because the company the campaign focuses on has little or nothing to do with the effort. It’s all customer driven. People recommending products they love straight from the heart — with no interference from the marketing folks — can easily make a product go viral.

But a bad WOM is equally tough to squelch, often generating reputationally-treacherous stories like the ones many U.S. airlines are often party to. Remember United Breaks Guitars (viewed 11.5 million times so far), or the Top 10 Reasons the Northwest pilots missed Minneapolis?

To me, WOM really comes home when I think of Southwest Airlines, the brainchild a few decades ago of Herb Kelleher and Rolin King. I tell people that I fly American and Southwest almost exclusively, but if Southwest Airlines flew to all my travel destinations, they’d corral all of my business, despite the slightly longer drive to MDW. Why? It’s so simple … flying Southwest I mean. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s a poster child for the public’s misunderstanding of the physics of flight, it has to be the stall. Every time some poor reporter in print or on TV, who hasn’t dug deep enough, relates it to the airplane’s powerplant, haven’t we all shaken our heads and thought less than nice things.

So, my smug aeronautical compatriots, let me ask you this. Who first used stall in an aerodynamic sense, when was it first used,  and whose flying inspired it? If you know the answer, you’re either a dedicated aero-trivia geek without a life, or you’ve read Then & Now: How airplanes got this way, Phil Scott’s new book, published by Sporty’s Pilot Shop.

It’s a quick, enjoyable, and enlightening read without being oppressively didactic. Its 94 pages are divided into 13 chapters and three “Literary Intermissions” that consider 1911’s take on “The Aeroplane—Past, Present, Future,” the life of an aviator’s wife in 1920, and Harriet Quimby on “How a Woman Learns to Fly.”

Scott’s student pilot days, when he was a college student in Kansas, are a thread that unites the chapters that reveal the genesis of the airplane’s physical structure, from wings and their stacking, wheels that found a hiding place, the cockpit and its fuselage home, how airports and flight training happened, and how the aeronautical lexicon grew.

It’s a read any pilot is sure to enjoy, but I’m biased. Phil is one of my favorite writers. From his first book, The Shoulders of Giants, about those pioneers, like Sir George Cayley, whose work led to the Wrights’ Kitty Hawk success, his captivating prose never fails to elicit smiles.

Oh, if you’re still wondering about the stall, it is on page 11, in Chapter Three, “Speaking our Language.” Wilbur used it in a 1904 letter to Octave Chanute. Discussing one of Orville’s flights, Wilbur wrote “after about 200 ft. he allowed the machine to turn up a little too much and it stalled.”

I could go on about the stall-spin accident, auguring in, and buying the farm, and all the other  fascinating bits in the book, but I don’t want to spoil your fun of discovery. –Scott Spangler

A judge for “What’s Your Story,” the Wittman Regional Airport writing contest for those in grades 3-12 in Oshkosh-area schools, I feel compelled to share some observations gleaned from the entries I’ve just read. As our future, I found their participation in and perspective on aviation enlightening.

In two categories, grades 3-8 and 9-12, students attending any school in the Oshkosh area were eligible to, “in your own words,” write no more than 500 words of prose or poetry that describe “what makes flying special to you.” A rough sum of the area school districts tallies roughly 15,000 students, with two thirds enrolled in Oshkosh schools.

By the deadline the contest received 44 entries, all but two from Oshkosh schools. The majority, were from middle schoolers in grades 6-8. Only two high schoolers, one male and one female, took time to write. Girls dominated the grade school category 30 to 12. Regardless of grade, their perspective on flight and aviation shunned nostalgia and romance.

For roughly three-quarters of the students, what impressed them most was the pre- and post-flight airport experience. Terminal’s shopping and eating opportunities was a common theme, followed by the security gauntlet and inconveniences of a missed flight. The dearth of words dedicated to the flight itself suggests that to these students it was no more memorable than riding the school bus.

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